Fifty Shades of Summer: 50 of the best poems about summer

Nature loosens her limbs, increases her ambition. Summer’s work is intense with colour, she paints with a brighter light. The hours of night diminish, quickly shrink. She has no need for rest but a yearning to work. Vibrant swathes of shooting, pulsing colour almost overwhelm. Her tempo is beyond our awed imagination.
Inspired, the air, the sea, the parching earth bring elemental strength. Summer storms, forest fires. The endless blue of sky, of ocean water will not still her work. Mistress of all. Our poets merely the inky pens of her will.

In fifty poems we take you on their inspiring journey, reflecting on the miracle of summer.

01 - Fifty Shades of Summer - An Introduction

02 - Summer by Alexander Pope

03 - Summer Song by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

04 - June by William Cullen Bryant

05 - A June Tide Echo by Amy Levy

06 - June. A Tale by William Cowper

07 - There is a June When Corn is Cut by Emily Dickinson

08 - Summer Dawn by William Morris

09 - All in June by William Henry Davies

10 - Dog Days by Amy Lowell

11 - The Idlers Calender - Twelve Sonnets for the Months - June by Wilford Scawen Blunt

12 - June Night by Sara Teasdale

13 - June at Woodruff by James Whitcomb Riley

14 - Dusk in June by Sara Teasdale

15 - Between the Dusk of Summer by William Ernest Henley

16 - A June Night by Emma Lazarus

17 - Epithalamion by Gerard Manley Hopkins

18 - Summer by Christina Rossetti

19 - A July Afternoon by the Pond by Walt Whitman

20 - On the Grasshopper and Cricket by John Keats

21 - Four Songs for Four Seasons by Algernon Charles Swinburne

22 - Answer July by Emily Dickinson

23 - Sonnet LVII - Summit of Skiddaw, July 7th 1838 by Henry Alford

24 - London in July by Amy Levy

25 - July 9th 1872 by Abram Joseph Ryan

26 - Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson

27 - A Man Young and Old - Summer and Spring by William Butler Yeats

28 - Written in July by Samuel Rogers

29 - From My Diary July 1914 by Wilfred Owen

30 - Summer in the South by Paul Laurence Dunbar

31 - The Longest Day by William Wordsworth

32 - Summer Evening by John Clare

33 - Summer Wind by William Cullen Bryant

34 - The Summer Rain by Henry David Thoreau

35 - Summer Night by Alfred Lord Tennyson

36 - Sonnet XVIII - Shall I Compare Thee To A Summers Day by William Shakespeare

37 - The Winds Tidings in August 1870 by Augusta Davies Webster

38 - August by Algernon Charles Swinburne

39 - An August Evening, 1865 by Carolyn Clive

40 - August by James Whitcomb Riley

41 - An August Midnight by Thomas Hardy

42 - From Piccadilly in August by John Freeman

43 - Memorials of a Tour in Scotland August 1803 by William Wordsworth

44 - August Moonrise by Sara Teasdale

45 - A Summer Evening Churchyard by Percy Bsysshe Shelley

46 - An Indian Summer Day on the Prairie by Vachel Lindsay

47 - Fair Summer Drops From Summer's Last Will And Testament by Thomas Nashe

48 - Indian Summer by Sara Teasdale

49 - Summer by Kahlil Gibran

50 - Summer is Ended by Christina Rossetti

51 - L' Envoi (An Extract) by Rudyard Kipling